The story that follows is a parable of human experience as essentially relational. People are individuals and vitally connected to others. Everyone lives according to relationships. The overemphasis on our individuality is misleading so that we ignore the ways that other people affect us in beneficial and disabling ways. This parable is an illustration of one sort of benefits and damages through being generated in families.

Parable of the Trees

In the forest many trees combine their roots, share soil, and take in air with light. The trees live side-by-side, and they stand as columns holding up the roof of leaves above. The trees are twisted and gnarled by age and weather. Branches that reached for sunlight are bent out from trunks, straining for the open patches of light and air. Below the surface in the dirt the roots tunnel around rocks and hardened clay. Here too there is competition for minerals and water. Roots bind and bend in a vast web of communal survival.

The trees grow in families: ash, pine, oak, willow, and so on. Thousands of families spread out in varieties with common bark and leaves. Each family cares for its own, with seedlings, saplings and old growth holding and defending scarce earth among the rest. New trees grow up feeding on the same soil, drinking from the same dark springs of ancient waters, and reaching with the same sorts of branches and leaves to the air and light above. Growth is constant, each after its kind.

One tree family is the sakluth trees, resembling a diseased cypress. The bark is thick and hard, twisted and stiff. The wood cannot be carved; when burned it gives foul fumes. Sakluth trees force their roots through the hardpan of sedimentary clay to scant trickles of water below. Their leaves are like pine needles to resist the harsh radiation of the sun. At the edge of the forest, sakluth trees do not share shelter from the sirocco winds or the shimmering heat. They stand as if alone and cling for life in the rocky and clay soils that other trees cannot penetrate. Even old growth sakluth appear stunted and cursed. Bitter sap oozes over the bark to give the look of disease. Sap has the look of tar, since it is drawn from acrid waters of the stagnant and poisoned pools beneath the hardpan. The bark is thorned to keep the pesky birds at bay.

When the earthquake shattered the forest landscape, many trees had fallen and others were half uprooted. A new wadi had opened alongside the sakluth grove, just at the edge of their roots. Clean waters poured from the collected rain and called to the sakluth trees. This change was a problem for the trees that had survived so lon